Hello Everybody, and Welcome to the first episode of Making Games With Ruby! I’m Tyler, and this video is brought to you by manwithcode.com

In this episode I’ll be covering what you will be learning in this series, what we’re using to develop our games, what I’m assuming about you, and why I’m teaching you.

What you’ll learn

If you couldn’t tell by the title, you’re going to learn how to make games using the Ruby programming language. More specifically I’m going to teach you how to make Pong. Though Pong may sound a little simplistic, and I’m not claiming it isn’t, learning how to make Pong will teach you almost everything you’ll need to know to make any game, with out getting bogged down in game specific details.

What we’re using

Of course we’re using the Ruby programming language. To create games, we’ll have the help of the Rubygame library, which is many things including a wrapper around SDL, and a nice framework for developing games.

In the creation of this series I will be using Ruby 1.8.7-p174, and Rubygame 2.6.2. Theoretically The code in this series should run on Ruby 1.8.whatever and Rubygame 2.whatever, no promises though, since languages and libraries change.

And if you want to know about my environment, I’ll be running Ubuntu 9.10 as my Operating System, and using Gedit as my text editor. You can write and run the code on any platform you wish, but this is what I prefer.

What I’m assuming about you

So I don’t have to explain every line of code to you, I’m going to be assuming that you already know the Ruby programming language. If you don’t there are many books available, as well as my own video series Programming With Ruby at http://manwithcode.com/ruby-programming-tutorials/

Just reading one book, or watching my video series probably isn’t enough. I’ll be easier if you have used Ruby for a while, and are comfortable with it. This isn’t
a requirement, but it would help make things easier on yourself.

Why I’m teaching this

There are many reasons why, but I’ll talk about the most important few:

1) I love making games.
2) I love teaching.
3) Teaching teaches me something. – When you actually sit down and think about what you do, things become more concrete, and you know why you do what you do, or even see bad habits that you need to correct
4) I’m trying to make money – Yep, I’m not going to try and hide this. Some of the videos in this series will be put up for sale, you’ll be able to see them as I put out more videos.